Two weeks ago I was interrupted as I meditated under a waterfall, contemplating the meaning of life as it relates to Accelerated Diagnostic combos. Future 2016 Durham Regional Champion Jesse Vandover PM’d me on Facebook:

Sounds like a deck that’s right up my alley!

The era of CI curbstomping unsuspecting locals for easy Store Championships was coming to a close, with everyone and their mom either playing Noise or Whizzard with some tech card that crushes you or Siphon spam or Shaper with an immoral number of Sacrifical Constructs. It had become time for a new deck that makes everyone want to quit Netrunner: The hero we neither need nor deserve:

IG Superfriends, brainchild of Jonas Wilson (TheBigUnit3000), the asshole who brought you DLR.

For those of you who live under a rock or play in a metagame where functional decks get dirty looks, Superfriends is a “prison” deck. The object is to assemble a board state that prevents the runner from being able to do anything useful THEN slowly bleeds them to death.

You opponent is trapped playing a mind-numbingly un-nteractive foregone conclusion of a game in the same way that they might be trapped in a prison. You don’t try to score agendas, you don’t try to assemble a burst kill, you just play assets until you win. You achieve this primarily by shuffling your deck until your opponents brain has turned into a homogenous, creamy soup.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is stick a Mumbad City Hall. This card, unchecked, can allow you to shuffle your deck a game winning amount of times on its own, but the fun doesn’t end there! Using City Hall, you can tutor up up to three copies of Museum of History, which gives you an additional shuffle at the start of every turn. Think of it as a PAD Campaign, but for shuffling.

Possibly the best part about all of this shuffling is the unbelievable timing of it when you activate City Hall to play Heritage Committee. Because you have the one copy of Heritage Committee in your deck, you can activate City Hall, look at the top three cards of your deck, and choose whether or not to play Heritage based on whether you want to draw those three cards. If you decide to do this, you get to put back whatever your shittiest card is and only then shuffle your deck. You can do this every turn thanks to your shuffling PAD campaigns constantly recurring your single copy.]

Why on earth wouldn’t you shuffle your deck immediately after searching up the card you were looking for? Why does a player have to maintain the order of their deck when they’re searching? This unique feature of Netrunner is due to the happy accident/rules nightmare known as “nesting triggers”. Nesting triggers are a rules phenomenon developed by Lukas Litzsinger, drunk, at 3 in the morning, when Jakodrako wouldn’t stop asking him unreasonably difficult questions about how Netrunner works. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?” posed Lukas rhetorically, and the nesting trigger rule was born.

So, in addition to an atrocious amount of shuffling and a general disregard for the interactive way the game was supposed to be played, Superfriends features, front-and-center, the amateur-hour scaffolding on which the game is built. The perfect posterboy for A Game of Thrones 2.0.

“All of this is well and good,” you might think, “but how is this deck supposed to drive away new and veteran Netrunners alike in spite of all of the positive changes due to the introduction of the MWL?” Well, I’m glad you asked that question. Possibly the best part of this deck is that the only thing that can beat it anywhere close half the time is good old Whizzard. Just in case you mistakenly thought that your Hayley deck packed to the brim with hot garbage to sell to Aesop was a reasonable alternative to Faust Pancakes, now you can take comfort in the fact that there is only one tier one runner deck and work that into your excuse to quit the game as you see fit.

But if you’re a glutton for punishment and want to join the dwindling number of regionals attendees this year, there is one strategy against IG you simply can’t show up without. Developed by professional blowhard Josh Wilson (Josh01), the “Moby” strategy uses every part of the tournament structure to your advantage.

The achilles heel of Superfriends is that it can take virtually forever to close out a game against a prepared opponent, and you never score more than 0-1 points in a game. When facing the deck in game 2 of a swiss round or a non-finals elimination round, Moby proponents, such as community hero Calimsha (Calimsha), advise you take your time to really think about the best play every turn and make sure to partake in the madness and shuffle your opponent’s deck. When you meander your way into an agenda, take out a copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville and just start reading! According to these angle-shooting mtgs, you’re virtually ensured to get at least 1 prestige point regardless of the eventual outcome of the game as long as you’re willing to accept a scumbag interpretation of the floor rules.

So next time you go to play a teaching game of Netrunner, bust out this bad boy to give your hapless opponent a taste of true power. Make sure to wish them a friendly farewell the next week as they “Dracarys!” their opponent’s “Littlefingers” or whatever the kids are into these days.

new player and I asked that an opponent at a recent meetup play this against me since he happened to have the deck with him. Basically I just wanted to see it in action. The game was awful. At one point I pretty sure I told him I was sick of cutting his deck. When I sat down for my next game against another opponent I was happy to be playing Netrunner again.